Where is all the football gone? While it’s another four years now to wait for the next Football (Soccer) World Cup, there is plenty of statistics to look back at from this year’s tournament in Brazil. “World” cup of course only applied to a small number of countries from around the world, as only 32 nations have qualified for the event. And then, one after another leaves early, so that the number of matches adds to the representation of countries and regions from around the world in this global sports event that – in terms of television ratings – is only superseded by the Olympics. Here is how the world looks distorted according to the total number of matches played at the 2014 World Cup:
And there is much more data that is counted during the event. The following map series looks into some of the statistics showing the distribution of goals, cards, fouls, tackles and much more of the action that went on during the four weeks in Brazil:
2014 – as so many times – shows that in the end football is a South American-European affair, while the rest of the world is often left behind the closer it comes to the final. The absolute number of each statistic represented in a map is noted in the grey-ish number behind the title. While quite logically those teams that went furthest (Germany, Argentina, but also Brazil and the Netherlands) appear overall largest in these maps, the devil’s in the detail, showing that there are quite some differences in the style of play between the nations, in the (good and bad) luck or the fairness of teams that cannot only be explained by more minutes on the pitch.
More football/soccer-related maps on this blog can be found here.
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